A rapid diagnostic approach to identify poisonous plants using DNA barcoding data

Plant exposures are indeed one of the most frequent cases reported to poison control centers. A rapid and easy screening test is required for accurate medical treatment.

However, it is usually based on the morphological analysis of ingested plant portions that is expensive in terms of time and resources requiring experience in systematic botany which could also be biased by the absence of clear diagnostic traits in stomach contents. In this study, we designed specific primer pairs for the amplification of a sequence-characterized amplified region within standard barcode regions (i.e., rbcL and trnH–psbA ) to detect toxic plants belonging to the genera Atropa and Colchicum .